This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Re: Exceptional UIs
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Avi's post on exceptions came right up in my face this morning with an error report on BottomFeeder. When the app is reading a feed, there's a wide variety of potential exceptions - many of them should just be ignored, and handled as nothing new now - for instance, getting a 500 or a 404 on a feed is typically a transient issue. On the other hand, there are also xml parsing errors - many of these I silently pass over and just handle - but I found one this morning that needed better handling
Say you try to add an RSS feed - and the site owners are getting hit with too many hits from your tool (either yours specifically, or someone else using Bf). The query for the feed answers back an html error document instead of an RSS doc - and the parsing fails. Well, the error handling for that case was all the way up in the UI, well after the query, and after the point where anything useful could be done. By moving the handling down a level, I was able to preserve the information so that a more useful error could be reported.
The way Smalltalk exceptions work is just too cool
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